Wildfires cause damage resulting in large costs of repair every year. In Europe this can amount to billions of Euros. In the U.S. and Canada alone about 54,500 square kilometers (about 13 million acres) burn each year. Although 99% of around 10,000 new wildfires each year are contained, the damage resulting from the uncontained wildfires and the cost of containing them are not acceptable and growing.
In August 2009, a forest fire occurred in the Angeles National Forest, Calif. Containment was not achieved at an early stage of the fire, and as a result the fire caused significant damage. The cost of the fire is estimated to be nearly $100 million. In comparison a 23.5 square kilometer fire at Kinneloa, near Pasadena, Calif. was controlled from a much earlier stage, and the resulting cost was $9.7 million. It is clear that the cost of an escaped fire is much higher than the cost if control is achieved early. Furthermore, even the most sophisticated of prevention and control measures would be unlikely to amount to the cost of an escaped fire.
In 2010 summer, Russian wild land fires have been estimated to cause around 55,000 deaths between the related heat wave and fire effects, at a cost of $15 billion in damage. The advancing desertification around the Mediterranean Sea basin is continually increasing the cost of wildfires, particularly in Spain, Italy and Greece.
Early fire detection and rapid fire suppression are important to fight the mounting cost of wildfires. A reliability of fire detection systems has improved recently through a combination of a use of conventional means such as observation towers, satellite data, and unmanned aerial systems. The combined effect of these systems provides a timely warning in most cases, at least in areas of particular concern such as national parks. However, the average time to deploy necessary fire suppression assets is too long allowing the fire to escape out of control in a significant number of cases. In other cases where the fire is controlled, this is often achieved by destructive means such as bulldozing firelines or back-burning.
Conventional measures for managing wildfires include a bulldozer, a fire truck or other equipment as a water source, and a team with shovels, rakes and hoes. In extreme cases the water source may be a helicopter or aerial tanker which drops the water from above. In other cases larger fire trucks, specialty bulldozers, tree cutting equipment and tools to track and predict the fire's movement may be used. The measures may be difficult to deliver rapidly into a wilderness, except for the helicopters and aerial tankers which are expensive. For example, an aerial tanker may cost around Euro 26 million. Furthermore, poor visibility and strong turbulence caused by fire make aerial delivery of fire suppressant a high risk operation. Workers delivering the suppressant have to work rapidly putting them under high levels of pressure which can result in poor delivery precision at the target location.
Another method to fight fire in remote areas is to send elite firefighters (smoke jumpers) who are parachuted into affected areas, but this may not be without significant dangers and this approach has claimed numerous lives.